


The Ballad Of Kit

by TheAbilaine



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Childbirth, Death, Death in Childbirth, F/M, Fire, First Kiss, Major character death - Freeform, Pregnancy, Pyromania, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29247873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAbilaine/pseuds/TheAbilaine
Summary: The beginning and the end were words.
Relationships: Count Olaf/Kit Snicket
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	The Ballad Of Kit

Words, even when they had been young, in classes and libraries, she knew words would be had, in the end.

She always had her hair tied up.

No one really knew what it looked like out of the tight, sleek bun she wore, two spare pencils skewered into its middle like the oriental styles she saw once at a play... no one, except him. He knew exactly how each ringlet sprung out and bounced when she stepped across the classroom, messily trying to find papers she needed. He knew why he detested her and why she avoided him. He knew that Lemony never would approve so he never told him but he knew. He knew that Jacques would agree with Lemony. 

Everyone knew that Kit Snicket loathed him.

And she had enough reason to… Olaf was chalk full of nasty habits, a barrel of crazy monkeys and rotten apples, the baddest boy.

Cracking his knuckles in the middle of sentences and biology. “That will hurt your hands,” she told him. Smoking, bringing a cigarette to his mouth and holding it between his teeth as he laughed at her horrified look; bad idea, she frowned when she saw that, the stray curl at her temple distracting, he wanted to cut it off with the craft scissors. “You are going to die with burnt out chest cavities, not even VFD or your father the firefighter could save you from it.” Drinking something entirely stronger than her coffee, he smuggled bottles underneath his school cardigan from late nights with disreputable students. She said nothing about his drinking, funny enough. 

It fit them.

He forever and always was telling her things too, the half year between them meant he had jurisdiction. He chided her like a child. And he would always say the same thing when she won an argument, “Don’t start, Snicket.”

The first kiss, she did not quite remember it. Kit’s lips were large and pouty, they reminded Olaf of peach slices, as if she nibbled them when thinking, which she did a lot of, from all those words she knew but did not say. It should have meant something, since it was after all her first. But all she remembered was the look on his face, disgustingly smug with triumph as he winked at her and his pack of bad boy’s called for him off down the hallway.

“I will marry you,” he says like it is a vow, underneath a bleacher, one winter, the last year of school.

She knew he was lying. 

“I will marry you,” he said now.

“There isn’t time for that.”

“Kit.” 

She would not look at him. “Yes, yes,” waving her hand at him, allowing some of her hair down her shoulders, while she tried to find her pencils, the comb laying useless against the vanity top. 

“Don’t start, Snicket...”

Exasperated, one of her favorite words, she always looked at him this way, exasperated. She always did have a worse temper than her brothers. He has to listen, she is not a child... she is the woman who had him aching last night while she lay there, clinging to him, whispering ridiculous poetry into his ear. 

None of it made sense, all her good grades and budding career… he still had a life he did not want or need, a dull future and mediocre playwright skills. 

As if to assess the sin they were living in, he leaned back, his chair creaking. His mouth opened slowly, slackened, he tips his chin upward and looks at her. He looks tired. He has his lean, knobby knuckled fingers tangled in her hair… and he will not listen, he had never listened when she told him to stop cracking his knuckles. 

It did not really matter if they vowed to love each other. Olaf never said it was a lie because Olaf never said anything that was null and void unless officiated by a priest making a cross in the air and before a congregation of devout, hypocritical sinners worse than he. At least he honestly owned his faults and sins. She still stepped through his ring of hellfire, crossed the line in the sand he, her brothers, even she drew... he smelled like cheap spirits, brimstone and she dragged it in slowly, just to reawaken herself to the reality of her situation.

She might have wanted it but her brothers did not know, she wanted to leave it that way. “I want you to leave it this way...” she told him.

And that was the last thing she ever told him about marriage. 

One week later they are engaged.

That night at the opera pulled the last thread unraveling the fabric of both their lives. 

Recurring nightmares woke Kit years after... if only she had not accepted Beatrice’s invitation, if only she had not worn the ring Olaf gave her, if only the box of darts had rotted in her silk gloved hands as she made her way back to Bertram’s private box, if only Olaf had not been waiting for her or asked her what she had.

If only she had not lied to him. 

Olaf met her three times that night... the first, when they arrived. He had been with Lemony outside the backstage entrance. They stood talking to someone important and Olaf was not listening she knew… she smiled, ran to embrace her brother, she felt Olaf’s eyes on her but she only excused herself, told her brother to enjoy the night, running up after Beatrice’s green gown snaking away like a python through the corridors of the opera house... she swore she heard her brother sigh, or it been Olaf.

The second time occurred in the lobby, after she had given her coat to the attendant to put away behind the counter and she stopped a moment, adjusting her gloves. “I hope they won’t mind me borrowing you...” and she nearly shrieked when strong, bony hands clutched her elbows and guided her through people, pushed her into a hallway and into someone’s box. He spent a moment just looking at her and not listening to her complaints listing off how juvenile his tactics to get her attention were until he had to kiss her. A loud sound and they both tripped apart when they realized the box was not abandoned as thought. “My apologies, madam, we did not know anyone was present, if we did we would have given you a better show”, Olaf had said, as if he were ordering at the hotel Escargot across the street. The woman huffed and puffed like a disturbed porcupine, shrugging her plump shoulders and without another word Olaf pulled Kit out into the hall again, readjusted her hair comb, and whispered, “Wait in the lobby for me,” and kissed her urgently, gave her a handsome, terrible smile, left her leaning against the wall... she did not tell him he had her lipstick smudged in the corner of his mouth. 

Beautiful words left Beatrice’s beautiful mouth that beautiful, horrible night, and the third meeting came to an end, in the panic of his father’s death. Bertram and Beatrice fled in a taxi before anyone could suspect them. The authorities and officers blocked off the murder scene, people were in hysteria and all Kit could do was stand in the lobby, mute and dumb in the crowded maze of people in formal wear. And he had given her a look that had haunted every lung full of air, every pulse of her blood, every beat of her heart, every word from then till her death... the look of utter loathing.

She did not see him for years after that fateful night.

The schism sent everything known into an oblivion. 

Olaf, an orphan now, reaped his betrayal of them all and did not try to hide his hand in the evil and nefarious businesses. His adamant revenge, she knew all too well that she deserved, fell to her when he framed her brother, Lemony, his best friend from childhood and school, into a crime he did not commit. Lemony exiled, Jacques and Kit were the only Snicket’s left the freedom to do anything for the cause.

She took to drinking, only to remind her of the taste of him. 

VFD knew Olaf’s location but it really did not make a difference seeing he had gone into some sort of retired form of villainy. 

Legally, he was a count, his father’s title had passed on to him, so had the fortune and estate... he squandered it all within a year or two at the beginning of his new villainous career. Nothing he did warranted their attention when others had grown worse and without monetary support his schemes were less than successful or noticeable. On reports his worst crimes were theft of a pretzel vender and littering public drinking fountains.

All good times, even remotely peaceful times, ended.

It truly began with the Quagmire house, burnt to the ground, parents and one of the triplets dead, underneath it the secret tunnel still intact. Then, the Baudelaire mansion, Beatrice and Bertram, dead, their children left without hearth, home or health benefits. Her own world turned to ash, dying, Kit knew instantly who had done the deed.

“Olaf,” she had told her brother, colleges, friends, the few and far between left in their once noble organization. 

Reports came that the children were sent to live with their closet living relative. With all their good deeds and better intentions, she would have expected nothing more from the two Baudelaire parents, to have no real plan but to live the best they could in a world doomed to destroy all the good deeds and better intentions in the end... in the end Olaf’s schemes succeeded again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

Her duty to watch over Beatrice’s children took her convictions and made them sharp as a two-edged sword. 

Knowledge of unfortunate events came to her too late and too early… investigations, witnesses, countless accounts of misdemeanors were her clues, she spoke to everyone and anyone who knew anything of the Baudelaire children or a man with the tattoo of an eye on his ankle matching her own no one ever saw because of the long coat she wore and tall useful boots. 

After the flop of Al Funkoot’s play The Marvelous Marriage, Olaf disappeared along with the talentless troupe of miscreants into the night. She found words on the ground, the script messy, his best work. 

Even with near to nothing to go on, following the children would just be following after him, reguardless, careless, thoughtless, Olaf still left the stench of burned buildings and murder behind him, milestone to his own unique brand of vandal, not even bothering to cover his tracks, she thought he had gone insane until she realized, perhaps too late... he wanted her to find him, he taunted her, he even dared her to follow him with the clutter and ashes leaving dotted lines across the world, for her to draw pencil lines to, just as she did in class.

She would smoke Olaf out with his own fire, she would track him down like the villain he made himself into and she would find him. 

Alone. 

The room was small, cramped and just like the one they had before she told him she would never marry him. 

Kit made excuses, started justifying all the methods she took to find him, he listened and listened until he had groaned aloud as if in agony… he made his own, across the room, until he lost his temper, pushed her against the motel wall and she did nothing but weep while he drank her in.

“I want you to come with me,” she told him. “We can leave this all, leave them all behind,” as if he would listen to her.

“Eyes follow, everywhere you go. Do you think you could just leave? Do you think... we could just leave? Walk out of it all, burn it all... it will take... time,” his breathing steadied for a moment. The bitterness in his tone stung his throat, and he remembered how she tasted better than liquor and he fully knew he had since then used it to keep himself drunk enough to forget... no, not to forget, to dull the ache, the need, want he had for her, useless as it was. He drained the bottle he reached the end of. He laughed at her, cruelly, calmly, his shiny, shiny eyes burning her. “Loathed or loved… you can’t really tell the difference, can you… so don’t start, Snicket.”

“You will fail, Olaf... like you have failed everyone including yourself. They’ll find you without my help. If you aren’t turned on by your own associates or destroyed by your own ways, before then. Now, congratulate yourself. Toast another plan that’s succeeded. Drink until you drown. I am leaving.”

Yes, she would leave but he had left so many times before... how would it ever make up for the abandonment he had put her through? 

Little would Kit understand how it shook the man to the burnt roots of his blackened heart. He stood stunned, a long moment. “You never were part of the plan...” Olaf said. “And I did not start that fire,” slowly, while she buttoned her coat, pulled up her long gloves, worn out with the rest of her clothing and her heart. 

“You are a liar,” she told him with a heavy lungful of air, she believed it.

“I did not start that fire,” he repeated, confessed, might have even begged against her skin, breath hot like gin, hands finding buttons, slipping inside with the lining of her coat, pushing it from her shoulders, fabric heaping around her feet on the floor. “You won’t leave, Kit... not yet,” and he kissed her and told her, “I will do that one last time, before the end,” and she stayed, for a little longer, but she did leave.

The child became just another thing he would leave behind. 

Crimes of passion make telltale stains, yellowed walls inside booked hotel rooms tell stories of smoking and so did the gentle marring on Kit’s flesh… they fade and never quite wash out. 

_I will kiss you like that one last time_ , he told her. 

Olaf and his promises meant nothing to her... Dewey became her second and last lover because she would not give her child the name of a man who the world thought of as a villain. 

When she left him, she cried, it was formality, when she heard of her husband's death, that she cried for him, as she cried for everyone now, because he had loved her and she had not loved him enough. She cried for the cruelty of the world, for the cruelty festering their noble organization, for the cruelty in the man she had loved too much when he had been unworthy of it. She cried for her child.

Through her pregnancy she kept on with her vigil over the Baudelaire children. 

Life’s cup runneth over with all sorts of storms and she found herself amid a tempestuous one, upon the high seas, she wondered what she would find after she voyaged so long. She washed up, beached finally, and hardly surprised Olaf lay there with her now.

Words did not comfort her in the last moments, pain of childbirth and pain of loss dragging her under, words he said when he had been too surprised to see her, words that could have been kind, if not for the way he twisted them so like he twisted his wrist to light matches. 

It would never be his _I will_ , or his shining eyes that had killed her, or his last cursed words that drove the nails into her proverbial coffin, even while he contentedly owned that he had been beaten, even while he bled out next to her while she bled out for their child, the whole world bleeding while the rain washed it away into sewers and down streams to oceans, the great cycle... scientists yet had to discover the oceans salt content came from the tears or the blood of all the broken people.

No words left, sun rising too bright and with her too cold last breath she knew what always had to be their end, the end of his promises, the end of her leaving… the end of the need for words. 

**Author's Note:**

> a dedication to one of the greatest love stories written


End file.
